The horses of the pursuing outfit were doing their best. They came on over the stretch of treacherous trail, laboring, pounding and clattering; singly sometimes, two and three abreast where there was room, keeping well together, their riders urging them with quirt and spur. For far back on the trail they had lost sight of Bud, though Keats had remembered that Bud had said Taylor had gone to Kelso Basin, and therefore Keats knew he was on the right trail. However, he did not want to let Bud get to Kelso before him to warn the Arrow outfit; for that would mean a desperate battle with a force equal in numbers to his own. Keats fought best when the advantages were with him, and he knew his men were similarly constituted. And so he was riding as hard as he dared, hoping that something would happen to Bud’s horse—that the animal might become winded or fall. A man could not tell what _might_ happen in a pursuit of this character. But the thing that _did_ happen had not figured in Keats’s lurid conjectures at all. That was why, when he heard Taylor’s quick challenge, he pulled his horse up sharply, so that the animal slipped several feet and came to a halt sidewise. Keats’s unexpected halt brought confusion to his followers. A dozen of them, crowding Keats hard, and not noticing their leader’s halt in time, rode straight against him, their horses jamming the narrow gorge, kicking, snorting and squealing in a disordered and uncontrollable mass. When the tangle had been magically undone—the magic being Taylor’s voice again, burdened with sarcasm bearing upon their excitement—Keats found himself nearest the nest of rocks from behind which Taylor’s voice seemed to come. The jutting crag behind which Taylor had concealed his horse, and where Bud had led King, completely obstructed Keats’s view of the gorge behind the crag, toward Kelso Basin, and Keats did not know but that the entire Arrow outfit was concealed behind the rocks and boulders that littered the level in the vicinity. And so he sat motionless, slowly and respectfully raising his hands. Noting his action, his men did likewise. “That’s polite,” came Taylor’s voice coldly. “Hemmingway says you’re looking for me. What for?” “I’ve got a warrant for you, chargin’ you with murderin’ Larry Harlan.” “Who accused me?” “Mint Morton, of Nogel.” There was a long silence. Behind the clump of rock Taylor smiled mirthlessly at Bud, who was watching him. For Taylor knew Mint Morton, of Nogel, as a gambler, unscrupulous and dishonest. He had earned Morton’s hatred when one night in a Nogel saloon he had caught Morton cheating and had forced him to disgorge his winnings. His victim had been a miner on his way East with the earnings of five years in his pockets. Taylor had not been able to endure the spectacle of abject despair that had followed the man’s loss of all his money.